This Common Infertility Treatment Could Be Dangerous

Unrecognizable pregnant woman standing by the window and touching her stomach.Lumina Images

When in-vitro fertilization attempts are unsuccessful or lead to miscarriage, doctors sometimes prescribe oral or injectable steroids called corticosteroids to increase women's fertility. But according to a new paper in Human Reproduction, these drugs could have some scary side effects.

Rather than aiding in IVF, prednisolone and other popular corticosteroids can actually interfere with implantation and cause miscarriage, premature births, and birth defects. Women who take them during their first trimesters are 64 percent more likely to have miscarriages, and their children are three to four times more likely to be born with cleft palates.

These problems may occur because corticosteroids suppress the immune system, lead author Sarah Robertson explained in a press release. Doctors and patients alike sometimes believe this suppression can help pregnancies along, but actually, it can hinder them. For example, the "natural killer cells" sometimes believed to prevent fetuses from implanting and developing actually play an important role in building up the placenta.

Doctors may be too concerned with just getting their patients pregnant instead of ensuring that the pregnancy has the desired outcome, Robertson added.

The paper recommends that doctors stop offering their patients corticosteroids unless they have autoimmune diseases that deem them necessary. "Unless overt immune pathology is evident," it reads, "utilization of corticosteroids is not warranted and may be harmful."